Movie review: Blackfish

Gabriela Cowperthwaite forces us to re-evaluate our relationship to the natural world as a whole.

Photograph by: Sarah Hoffman
, Postmedia News

Blackfish

Four stars out of five

Starring:

Directed by: Gabriela Cowperthwaite

Running time: 82 minutes

Parental guidance: Not recommended for young children

The movie pulls you in from the moment it begins with a 911 call from SeaWorld describing the events that led to Dawn Brancheau’s death.

The veteran trainer had been pulled into the water by a 5.4-tonne bull orca named Tilikum after a “Dine With Shamu” show in February 2010. She was bleeding profusely from wounds to her arm and scalp. Her spinal cord was severed, and while rescuers scrambled to save her life by deploying a net and making noises to distract the animal, they could not recover Brancheau’s lifeless body until more than 30 minutes later.

It’s a true horror story, but what makes Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary about this particular tragedy so compelling is the way it forces us to re-evaluate our initial perception of the whole narrative, as well as our relationship to the natural world as a whole.

As humans we’ve learned to tame, harness and exploit animals to meet a variety of needs from physical hunger to emotional companionship. We use language to address them, give them names and take photos in cute poses to paste all over the pages of Facebook.

We say we love animals, but Blackfish makes that statement seem positively absurd as Cowperthwaite breaks down the bits and pieces of fact to reveal a picture much larger than a single whale and its homicidal history.

Moving from the details of Brancheau’s death to interviews with seamen who made a living catching orcas for marine parks, Cowperthwaite stretches the canvas to the very edge, where it meets with human experience, without making us feel guilty.

There is no lecture about animal rights. There are no angry tirades. Outside of Cowperthwaite’s obvious storytelling skills, one barely feels an agenda at all — which is probably the film’s biggest asset as a piece of “entertainment” because it allows us to approach the content as an engaged and fully feeling viewer.

This is critical because by the second scene we realize the central victim in this piece isn’t Brancheau, but the leviathan stuck in a concrete swimming pool.

Tilikum started his life as a performing whale in Victoria, B.C., more than 20 years ago. It was there, at the now-defunct Sealand of the Pacific in Oak Bay, that he first made headlines as the killer whale responsible for the death of swim champion and part-time trainer Keltie Byrne.

At the time the details of the tragedy weren’t entirely clear. Did Byrne slip? Was she dragged? Did the whale intend to kill her or merely play with her in orca fashion?

Cowperthwaite finds actual witnesses to the February 21, 1991, events and for the first time we hear their testimony.

It’s eye-opening, even if you thought you were familiar with the case, because the facts aren’t coming from a police report. They are coming from two people who watched another person die, and there is a significant difference between the two.

It’s called emotion, and it’s where Blackfish would either sink or swim as a film unto itself: Too much and it’s mindless, animal activist propaganda; too little and it comes off as sensationalist exploitation.

It’s an almost impossible balance, but Cowperthwaite’s years behind the camera and in the edit suite pay off huge rewards. She not only finds the right fulcrum between sap and sentience, she hits the right emotional frequency and transcends the standard and altogether expected species divide.

The key scene sears itself into memory shortly after we hear a neurologist talk about the limbic system, the part of the brain believed to be responsible for feeling. According to the expert, orcas have a limbic system far more advanced than a human’s — suggesting killer whales may have greater depth of feeling than we do.

We’re also told that in the wild, baby orcas never leave their mother’s side.

The next scene shows us a mother being forcibly separated from her calf because at SeaWorld the calf can ruin the show. For hours, days, the mother emits a noise the trainers had never heard. It was a distance call. Though her baby was now in the belly of an airplane, she was desperately trying to find it using a frequency that could have travelled hundreds of miles in open water.

Cowperthwaite doesn’t back this up with symphonic strings. She doesn’t have to. The movie functions more like a police procedural, assembling all the data with a rather clinical hand until we see the whole, bloody picture.

By meticulously chasing down each angle of the story — from eyewitnesses, cetacean experts and former SeaWorld employees — we begin to see the individual tragedies of Dawn Brancheau and Keltie Byrne as a symptom of an insidious condition that systematically discounts our impact on the world around us to facilitate profit.

Tilikum may be the killer whale, but he is not the villain.

Without pointing a single finger — not at SeaWorld, not at the whale and not at the human species as a whole — Cowperthwaite’s film throws our whole understanding of the natural world into question as it sinks its teeth into the very flesh of life — all life — and reminds us that we are all here together.

No matter how much we try to separate ourselves into different pools, catalogue and archive genetic strands of difference, and safely stand back from the splash zone where animal and human meet, we’re undeniably part of the same system.

Very few movies have been able to accomplish such a seamless blend of heart-thumping action, sober science and universal emotion, but Blackfish not only makes this epic leap look easy — it fills you with awe, dread and the tingle of life’s miracle at the same time.

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